Due to the high complexity involved in behaviour of clays the pile-raft system seems to be the most viable approach to carry heavy loads. Very limited research work is available on this in context to soft clays using pile-raft system. Present research aims to study the elastic and non-elastic response of intergrated and non-integrated pile-raft system embedded in soft clay using physical model approach. The pile-raft model system is fabricated using Aluminum material for the slenderness ratio, L/D, 10 with suitable scale factor. The behavior was compared with responses of flexible unpiled raft, single pile, rigid pile groups. The effect of numbers of piles on the settlement, load improvements ratio and settlement reduction ratio are some of the major parameters presented and discussed.

settlement reducing pile; flexible raft; load improvement ratio; settlement reduction ratio